My multimedia player of choice is VLC. One of my favorite features is that it supports CD-TEXT. For some reason, though, when I inserted my CD and Lubuntu prompted me for the application to run and I selected VLC it would play the CD but without the CD text (and it would also be sluggish and jerky for the first couple seconds as it loaded the metadata manually). Interestingly, if I loaded VLC and then used the Media > Open Disc... option, the CD would load quickly with the CD text. After a lot of trial and error, this was the workaround that worked well for me: